John Braddock's Blog, page 4

When Strategies Appear "Irrational"

In Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars (plural), there’s a discussion about how World War II started. Hanson says, “Emotions push states to war as much as does greed” (p. 25).In A Spy’s Guide To Strategy, we use a simple model to analyze strategies.It looks like this: Strategists have a Positive-Sum Endgame in mind. They reason backward through Zero-Sum Games of conflict and Positive-Sum Games of alliance, then take action to build and win those games to reach their Endgames.Important...

Silicon Valley Investor Naval On Positive-Sum and Zero-Sum Games

Investor Naval Ravikant is considered a sage in Silicon Valley. Dilbert creator and tech investor Scott Adams calls him one of the smartest people he knows. Naval (he prefers the single name brand) recently did a Periscope where he took questions from viewers. The whole discussion is interesting, but readers of the Spy’s Guide series will find his discussion of Positive-Sum and Zero-Sum Games fascinating. He takes those concepts beyond the thinking and strategic points in A Spy’s Guide To Thi...

Using Spy's Guide Concepts To Build Strategies: A Review

Dr. Jerry Smith is Vice-President of Data Sciences and Artificial Intelligence at Cognizant. Recently, he wrote about using the concepts in A Spy's Guide To Thinking andA Spy's Guide To Strategy to build strategies. He graciously allowed a reprint here:----------"Really understanding strategy is a hard problem. One that requires itself a strategy. Amazon list over 200,000 books on strategy. Finding any book is easy. It’s a simple query executed in a text field of a web page. It’s results in a...

Jordan Peterson, DADA and Games

Jordan Peterson has the #1 nonfiction book at Amazon for the fourth week in a row. As a clinical psychologist, he has insights into behavior, and he likes to call out silliness when he sees it. His book is called 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos.Peterson knows history. As a university professor, he knows modes of thinking change over time. “Framing” changes over time. What we do with the data from the world around us changes over time.In an interview last year, Peterson talked about ho...

Taking Action To Generate More Data

This is one in a series of Spy's Guide book reviews. For more, see spysguide.com/blogMichael V. Hayden, Playing To The EdgeAs boss of the National Security Agency during 9/11 and later boss of the CIA, Hayden managed two intelligence bureaucracies. At NSA, Hayden’s work was expected to be in the first two steps of the DADA sequence: Hayden’s job at NSA was to collect as much data as possible, maybe more than anyone else in the world. Then, the job was to analyze it. To translate and filter it...

A Spy's Career Tied To History

This is one in a series of Spy's Guide book reviews. For more, see spysguide.com/blogJack Devine, Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's StoryA spy’s career is tied to history. From the 1970s through mid-1990s, Jack Devine worked in the trenches of major historical moments. He was a young case officer in Chile during the Pinochet coup. He touched on the Iran-Contra Affair. He worked to supply Charlie Wilson’s War in Afghanistan. He rose through the ranks and became Acting DDO, head of the Dire...

Simple

I’ve been part of the most powerful organization in the world. I’ve been part of startups. I’ve been a consultant to CEOs. I’ve started my own companies. I’ve hired, fired and hired again. I’ve managed investor money and invested in other companies. If you do these things, there’s one thing you need: You need simple. You need simple because you’re working with complex data. You’re modeling and building forecasts and doing analytics. You’re making decisions and advising decisions that mean bil...

Why Negative-Sum Games Don’t Matter (Most Of The Time)

Positive-Sum Games and Zero-Sum Games are important. Positive-Sum Games are win-win games. Zero-Sum Games are win-lose games. When you put them together in a sequence, you can understand others’ strategies. They also help you build your own (See A Spy’s Guide To Strategy for how those sequences work).Negative-Sum Games don’t matter as much for strategies. Most of the time. They don’t matter because people usually avoid lose-lose games. You see it when you drive. Drivers are avoiding other veh...

Day Of The Endgame

When you’re figuring out the other side’s strategy, you start with their Endgame.That’s because most people follow the first rule of strategy: Look forward and reason backward.Strategies are built when people imagine an Endgame. From there, they reason backward. They build a strategy for getting the people, places and things for their Endgame to exist.Most strategies look like this: To learn more about this sequence, read A Spy’s Guide To Strategy.But sometimes you don’t know the other side’s...

"Tips From Spies" Interview On NPR's Planet Money

When you do an edited radio interview, you give up a lot of power. You sit and talk for a while. They ask questions. You answer them. Then the real work begins.  The interviewer and editor cut and splice what you say. They pull together what they think will be interesting to their audience. They try to get good quotes. They try to make the interview something their audience will listen to and share.They try to create "good radio."In the course of that, they have a lot of power over how you so...